1In the early summer both Betsey and Melissa had sons and Honora was as good as or better than her word. A trust officer from the Appleton Bank brought the good news to Coverly and Moses and they agreed to continue Honora’s contributions to the Sailor’s Home and the Institute for the Blind. The old lady wanted nothing more to do with the money. Coverly came on from Remsen Park to New York and planned with Moses to visit St. Botolphs for a week end. The first thing they would do with Honora’s money was to buy Leander a boat and Coverly wrote his father that they were coming.

2Leander gave up his job at the table-silver company with the announcement that he was going back to sea. He woke early on Saturday morning and decided to go fishing. Struggling, before dawn, to get into his rubber boots reminded him of how rickety his limbs—or what he called his furniture—had gotten. He twisted a knee and the pain shot and multiplied and traversed his whole frame. He got the trout rod, crossed the fields and started fishing in the pool where Moses had seen Rosalie. He was absorbed in his own dexterity and in the proposition of trying to deceive a fish with a bird’s feather and a bit of hair. The foliage was dense and pungent and in the oaks were whole carping parliaments of crows. Many of the big trees in the woods had fallen or been cut during his lifetime but nothing had changed the loveliness of the water. Standing in a deep pool, the sun falling through the trees to light the stones on the bottom, it seemed to Leander like an Avernus, divided by the thinnest film of light from that creation where the sun warmed his hands, where the crows carped and argued about taxes and where the wind could be heard; and when he saw a trout it seemed like a shade—a spirit of the dead—and he thought of all his dead fishing companions whom he seemed cheerfully to commemorate by wading this stream. Casting, gathering in his line, snagging flies and talking to himself, he was busy and happy and he thought about his sons; about how they had gone out in the world and proved themselves and found wives and would now be rich and modest and concerned with the welfare of the blind and retired seamen and would have many sons to carry on their name.

3That night Leander dreamed that he was in strange country. He saw no fire and smelled no brimstone but he thought that he was walking alone through hell. The landscape was like the piles of broken and eroded stone near the sea but in all the miles he walked he saw no trace of water. The wind was dry and warm and the sky lacked that brilliance that you see above water, even at a great distance. He never heard the noise of surf or saw a lighthouse although the coasts of that country might not have been lighted. The thousands or millions of people that he passed were, with the exception of an old man who wore some shoes, barefoot and naked. Flint cut their feet and made them bleed. The wind and the rain and the cold and all the other torments they had been exposed to had not lessened the susceptibility of their flesh. They were either ashamed or lewd. Along the path he saw a young woman but when he smiled at her she covered herself with her hands, her face dark with misery. At the next turn in the path he saw an old woman stretched out on the shale. Her hair was dyed and her body was obese and a man as old as she was sucking her breasts. He saw people astride one another in full view of the world but the young, in their beauty and virility, seemed more continent than their elders and he saw the young, in many places, gently side by side as if carnality was, in this strange country, a passion of old age. At another turn in the path a man as old as Leander, in the extremities of eroticism, approached him, his body covered with brindle hair. “This is the beginning of all wisdom,” he said to Leander, exposing his inflamed parts. “This is the beginning of everything.” He disappeared along the shale path with the index finger up his bum and Leander woke to the sweet sounds of a southerly wind and a gentle summer morning. Separated from his dream, he was sickened at its ugliness and grateful for the lights and sounds of day.

4Sarah said that morning that she was too tired to go to church. Leander surprised everyone by preparing to go himself. It was a sight, he said, that would make the angels up in heaven start flapping their wings. He went to early communion, happily, not convinced of the worth of his prayers, but pleased with the fact that on his knees in Christ Church he was, more than in any other place in the world, face to face with the bare facts of his humanity. “We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee,” he said loudly, wondering all the time who was that baritone across the aisle and who was that pretty woman on his right who smelled of apple blossoms. His bowels stirred and his cod itched and when the door at his back creaked open he wondered who was coming in late. Theophilus Gates? Perley Sturgis? Even as the service rose to the climax of bread and wine he noticed that the acolytes’ plush cushion was nailed to the floor of the chancel and that the altar cloth was embroidered with tulips but he also noticed, kneeling at the rail, that on the ecclesiastical and malodorous carpet were a few pine or fir needles that must have lain there all the months since Advent, and these cheered him as if this handful of sere needles had been shaken from the Tree of Life and reminded him of its fragrance and vitality.

5On Monday morning at about eleven the wind came out of the east and Leander hurriedly got together his binoculars and bathing trunks and made himself a sandwich and took the Travertine bus to the beach. He undressed behind a dune and was disappointed to find Mrs. Sturgis and Mrs. Gates preparing to have a picnic on the stretch of beach where he wanted to swim and sun himself. He was also disappointed that he should have such black looks for the old ladies who were discussing canned goods and the ingratitude of daughters-in-law while the surf spoke in loud voices of wrecks and voyages and the likeness of things; for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog’s mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho. He waded out to his knees and wetted his wrists and forehead to prepare his circulation for the shock of cold water and thus avoid a heart attack. At a distance he seemed to be crossing himself. Then he began to swim—a sidestroke with his face half in the water, throwing his right arm up like the spar of a windmill—and he was never seen again.